


Welcome to Disc Vale

by ERNest



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Magic School Bus, Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Aristophanes References, Puns & Word Play, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-19
Updated: 2015-02-24
Packaged: 2018-03-13 20:41:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3395630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A small desert community... on the back of a giant turtle floating through space... Welcome! To Disc Vale!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Radio Broadcast

The Thieves Guild will be making their rounds this week, asking for donations of a few dollars, ten if you’re feeling generous, and, yes, the occasional arm and/or leg. But don’t worry, folks, the limb in question doesn’t need to be yours. Just remember: If you pay up today, you won’t bleed out in an alley somewhere tomorrow.

Khoshekh, the levitating cat in the men’s bathroom, has been getting positively chubby lately, because as you might recall, he can’t reach the floor with his four tiny adorable paws. He seemed unhappy about the situation, so Intern Brad has figured out an exercise and massage regimen for our furry friend. Thank you, Brad! And now, dear listeners, [the Weather](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBdSqk78nHw).

 

The post office – you know, the one that promises to work even through the Glom of Nit – is reopening later this week. Moist von Lipwig says that the demonic screams emanating from the building are not demons at all, but letters. Says the avalanche of paper is stuffed full of time. Says words have power. I don’t know about you, dear listeners, but I‘m inclined to agree. It’s why I got into radio, after all.

Still, the mail service will never be able to compete with the sealed envelopes hand delivered by the sheriff’s secret police. Nice try, Mr. von Lipwig, nice try.

We have messages to deliver and speed is of the essence. It’s not enough anymore to know that a king is dead sometime this month, not when we have the technology to find out the price of dried prawn in Genua. Of course, that’s gets to be difficult when it’s too expensive to send anything longer than GRANDAD DEAD FUNERAL THURS.

We could send letters instead and they might be slow but at least the mail coaches are reliable. It takes time to cipher nine pages of color diagrams and by the time they’ve finished, the dead are passing along a message of their own.

 

Words are not toys and must not be rubbed out or disrespected. This is why dwarfs spend years learning to speak and reason before they are ever handed a writing utensil; they must not tell lies.

The City Council has taken the entirely wrong lesson away from this cultural norm, and they’ve just banned any kind of writing utensil yet require every citizen to keep a dream journal. The one question no one has figured out is whether it is worse to write a lie or destroy it.

 

This is a story about you. Yes, you! Single microbe in an entire underwater colony, you finally get to receive these sound waves that have been converted into electrical energy and then to more radio signals and finally back to sound. And the frequencies full of information are no longer random and meaningless, careening through mediums on a whim of fate or physics. No, dear unicellular organism, this broadcast directly pertains to you.

You feed on the energy generated by the geothermal vents and there are no consequences. There is a thick column of black smoke, so you revel in the power that emanates from the core of the earth. Somewhere in this swarm of organisms is the individual that spawned you. There is no point in trying to find each other because it’s not like you’d recognize the other one. You too have spawned more like you, but you would not know them, so you do not try to learn them.

 

Carlos, dear sweet Carlos, who arrived in our fair town just one short year ago, has disappeared into the entrance to the ancient city under lane six of the bowling alley. I fear for our favorite scientist’s life! He may have been broken by the fall, and if not, the horrible monsters that lie in wait have no doubt taken him hostage and may even plan to put him to death. But if need be, I will follow him to the deepest part of this hellish world. I would even face down the most dreaded creatures of all to bring him back. Yes, listeners, I will confront… FROGS!


	2. Police Report

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Please imagine Vimes as played by Idris Elba

Hating Clues was one thing, Commander Vimes thought to himself, but fabricating evidence so you didn’t have to look at them or think about them was on a whole different level. It wasn’t good policing to simply take the victims in to the Patrician’s mime traps for reeducation.  
And now the sheriff’s secret police had gone too far. He was even tempted to say they were as bad as the Day Watch. Sam could get used to a dart board that had been shredded with a dart thrown by an overeager Detritus, but over the past few weeks, he had discovered that a sabotaged stove was not going to work out for his employees.

Lord Vetinari is many things, but a military strategist he is not. In fact, most of his strategies tend to involve avoiding the military branch completely until he is left with no other option and even then he manages to find an alternative. He glances down at the map indicating the invading forces. “Commander Vimes, what do you propose we do?” he says mildly.  
Vimes looks up from his hand, which was injured earlier by one of the creatures. “We could always kick them,” he says seriously. “I’ll send my men around in groups of three as soon as we’ve finished up here.”  
“Kick them,” he repeats. “Explain.  
“The way I see it, they’re a hivemind, right? So you kick one kaiju, you’ve kicked them all. Only we’re not going to stop there. We’ll kick all of them so it’ll be like each one has been kicked a hundred times. Right where it hurts – ah, sir.”  
“That’s hardly gentlemanlike behavior, Commander.”  
“If you fight like a gentleman you’re setting yourself up for trouble even in the best cases. And the kaiju are no gentlemen.”

Sam Vimes is the truth, or makes the truth, no one can tell anymore. He believes in people and if not in their goodness, then in their capacity to stop being bad. There are rules which must be followed no matter what culture you belong to. Even Vimes is not exempt from those rules and if he ever starts to think he is, that’s a sure path to tyranny. The descendant of a king-killer, the man who arrested two world leaders to end a war and because they were /wrong/, he can never give in to corruption; it would be better to die.  
He knows also that there are other rules beyond treating people with kindness and respect. Human nature is a dark place which demands tribute and violence and lots of tiny injustices in an attempt to make up for the larger inescapable ones. Humanity scares him sometimes but he stares back unblinking. He can feel something rising up inside of him, thick and red like rage. The writing on the wall is etched into his heart and he pushes it down, slams door after door so it can’t get loose, everything short of erasing it from the blackboard of his mind.  
Once, long ago, he tried to conquer the inner demons with dark, deaden his humanity even for a little bit, but it’s only fed the beast. Vimes hasn’t drunk anything for years now and he’s gotten used to being permanently knurd.  
Vimes never wanted to be a god but in matters like this the individual has very little to do with it. It’s all about belief and already there are legends told about him. If Sam Vimes says that something is true, it /is/, and having any kind of truth at all is vital in this situation. It’s better than fumbling in the dark with a lighted match, trying to find a powderkeg that’s been waiting for centuries.


	3. Magical Boyfriends

Carlos knows how to recognize his fellow scientists because they pronounce “unionized” with one more syllable than the plumbers do. However, he also recognizes that his mirrored counterparts deserve the right to organize for a living wage. For all he knows, he could be a double himself, so however it works that he pays these nonspecific images, he is happy to do so.

Carlos Ramon didn’t expect to be here, ever. He wasn’t always going to be a scientist. Too much writing, he always said, and why would he want to take down data when he could be making something happen?  
That was until fourth grade, when a zany teacher with her red hair in a spiral bun taught him that discovery was at least as much fun as creation. Carlos began to take notes and notice everything.  
He looked up at lights about a hundred feet above his head. Ralphie should be here instead, he thought; he’d actually believe in all these Shapes and Hooded Figures. But instead, this town got Carlos, who still couldn’t be sure that it actually existed.  
Still, he was determined to get to the bottom of this, so he made up his mind and walked the five blocks to the radio station, which was the only place he could really trust. When the weather started, he looked straight in Cecil’s eyes and invited him to take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.  
The music track played twice that day, because Cecil was busy kissing his new perfect scientist boyfriend.

Carlos has a new favorite word. He didn’t think anything could top “science,” and maybe this one is only worth so much coming from one very important person. The tongue pressing against the back of the teeth is such a thrilling thing to watch and then the N slides into the high excitement of a long E, which then collapses in on itself in an embarrassed smear of vowels and ends percussively and then Cecil says it again – “NEAT!” It’s almost unbearably adorable and Carlos blushes to hear it. “Neat,” he agrees.


End file.
